Chapter 16 #2
The bench felt emptier. Alice sat for a moment, then rose and walked toward the edge of the lawn where she could see the oak tree.
Freddie had scaled the second branch and was directing James and Charlie from above, his voice carrying instructions that sounded suspiciously like military commands.
James straddled a lower limb, grinning. Charlie sat on a branch opposite, his legs dangling, his face tilted toward the canopy.
He was smiling. A real smile, loose and boyish, lit by dappled sunlight falling through the leaves.
Alice pressed her hand to her waist and felt the boning of her corset beneath the silk.
She would not carry a child. Kenneth had made that clear in the carriage, in the study, in every closed door and measured retreat. He would not risk it. He would not risk her, or himself, or the architecture of control he had built around his grief.
She understood his reasons. She could trace them back to a room thirty feet from where the twins slept, to a woman who had died bearing his sons, to guilt he carried into the lining of everything he did.
But understanding did not lessen the ache.
She watched Charlie swing his legs against the bark. Freddie leaned down and said a word that made all three boys laugh, and the sound carried across the lawn, sharp and clear and young. Alice turned away before the wanting could settle any deeper.
“Your Grace.”
Three women stood behind her, arranged in a half-circle that suggested coordination rather than coincidence.
Alice recognized Lady Ashton from the dinner at Harcourt Hall.
The other two were younger, dressed in matching shades of lavender, their faces set into smiles that stopped well short of warmth.
“Ladies.” Alice curtsied after they did. “How lovely to see you.”
“We could not resist introducing ourselves.” The taller woman extended her hand. “Miss Amelia Cheswick. And my sister, Miss Catherine. We are great admirers of yours, Your Grace.”
“That is very kind.”
“Indeed.” Lady Ashton stepped forward. Her perfume was cloying, rosewater layered over musk. “We have followed your story with tremendous interest. The entire town has. A wedding-day disappearance, a substitute bride, a duke left scrambling. It reads like a novel. A rather sensational one.”
Alice kept her expression neutral. “I am afraid the reality is considerably less dramatic than the gossip suggests.”
“Oh, I doubt that.” Miss Amelia tilted her head. “Tell me, Your Grace, have you heard from your sister? It must be terribly distressing, not knowing where she is. Though I suppose some would say she showed remarkable judgment in leaving when she did.”
“My sister’s circumstances are private. I am sure you understand.”
“Of course.” Lady Ashton’s voice dropped to the register Alice recognized from Harcourt Hall, calibrated to sound confidential while carrying to every ear within range.
“Though it is curious that Lady Rachel was considered the Diamond of the Season, and yet it was her younger sister who secured the Duke, is it not? People talk, Your Grace. They cannot help themselves.”
“What people say is seldom my concern.”
“Perhaps it should be.” Miss Catherine spoke for the first time.
Her voice was softer than her sister’s, almost gentle, and the gentleness made what followed land harder.
“The consensus is that Lady Rachel was the accomplished one. The beautiful one. The ton had scarcely heard of you before the wedding. And now you are a duchess, your sister has vanished, and people wonder how a woman who spent three Seasons without a single dance managed to attract a duke who could have had his pick of any eligible lady in England.”
The words moved through Alice like cold water poured down her spine. She held very still.
Behind her, Freddie’s voice rose from the oak tree, and the sound reached her as though from a great distance.
“You must forgive Catherine.” Miss Amelia’s smile broadened, showing teeth.
“She is young. She speaks plainly. But you must admit, Your Grace, that the situation invites speculation. A woman of your… proportions landing a man like His Grace.” Her gaze traveled down Alice’s figure and back up.
“It defies the natural order. Unless, of course, the rumors about your involvement in Lady Rachel’s disappearance carry truth. ”
Alice looked at each face in turn: Lady Ashton’s cool appraisal, Miss Amelia’s practiced sweetness, Miss Catherine’s soft-edged cruelty.
She had stood before women arranged in exactly this formation a hundred times.
In ballrooms where no one asked her to dance.
In drawing rooms where the chairs were spaced to exclude her.
In her father’s parlor, where Rachel’s portrait hung in gilt and her absence from the walls was its own verdict.
She had survived all of it.
She would survive this.
“Ladies.” Her voice did not waver. “I appreciate your candor. You must excuse me.”
She turned and walked away. She kept her pace slow, her spine straight, her hands folded against her skirts so that no one could see them trembling.
She crossed the lawn toward the far side of the garden, past the string quartet and the refreshment tent and the clusters of guests who turned to watch her.
A gap in the hedge opened onto a narrow path bordered by yew.
She followed it without choosing to, letting the green walls close around her until the path widened into a clearing hidden from the main garden by a screen of espaliered pear trees.
A wrought-iron bench sat beneath them, half-covered in trailing ivy.
Alice sat down. The iron was cold through her dress. The sounds of the party reached her muffled and stripped of detail, the string quartet reduced to a thin vibration, the voices flattened into a hum that carried no individual words.
She pressed her fingers to her closed eyes.
“… a woman of your proportions… It defies the natural order.”
She had believed Bearmoor would change her.
She had believed that a title and a castle and a husband who stood between her and cruelty at dinner tables would be enough to rewrite the story she had carried since girlhood: the overlooked one, the too-plump disappointment, the sister who filled space and returned nothing of value.
But London remembered. London always remembered. And no amount of ducal authority could silence the voices that had measured her against Rachel since birth and found her lacking in every category that mattered.
She pressed her fingers harder against her closed eyes and waited for the pressure to displace the thought, but it did not.
Suddenly, a voice came through the entrance of the clearing.
“Why are you hiding, wife?”